photo: Jordan Curtis Hughes

***

A few years ago, Jack Antonoff took his childhood bedroom on tour—quite literally.

“The spaces where things happen are extremely exciting and emotional for me,” the 40-year-old singer, guitarist and producer says in early October, a few days after headlining New York’s Madison Square Garden for the first time with his long-running solo project, Bleachers. “That’s a big part of what makes live music special. You’re creating something in a space that is magical for that space. When I go into these rooms before anyone gets there, even if it’s MSG, it just looks like an arena. It isn’t until all of our people get in there that it feels special. I also have private spaces, and I always think to myself: ‘I wish I could have my audience in here.’ It’s my way of trying to bring people as close to the process as possible.”

So, before Bleachers’ 2017 tour, Jack deconstructed the suburban New Jersey bedroom he occupied into his 30s, well after achieving international fame, and rebuilt it as a pop-up that fans could visit on the road. He stripped the room—which was adorned with stickers, posters and other memorabilia from a lifetime of concert-going—turning his activation into the ultimate #TBT. It caused a little neighborhood commotion, but his parents were thinking of redoing that part of the house anyway.

For Bleachers’ self-titled, fourth LP, which was released in March through Dirty Hit and his own Bleachers Music, Jack decided to take things a step further on the road. He not only recreated his workspace at New York’s famed Electric Lady Studios—where he’s crafted the soundtrack to more than one not-so-cruel summer—on stage at select stops, but also used that setup to actually record new music.

“With the first iteration of this idea, we were recording, mixing and AirDropping songs to the audience from that night,” he says of the From the Studio to the Stage tour. “With my Electric Lady room, I go up there and I’m literally recording onto quarter-inch tape. I’ve put some of that on Instagram, and then I’m gonna release a rolling live album. This stuff is extremely intense and heady, but the concept is very simple—there’s always this massive distinction between the albums and the music, with all bands and all artists. And I sit in this interesting position where I have really intense lives, both in the studio and on tour. I wanted to put all these things together, so they’re not separate.”

It’s a visual personification of the dual lives Jack has lived for the better part of the last two decades, and the dichotomy that has long existed between his music and public persona. Though the name Bleachers itself conjures images of sitting on the sidelines, few musicians have played a bigger role than Jack in shaping the pop culture zeitgeist in recent years. In the studio, he’s brought his distinctive energy and indie-rock spirit to more A-list acts than anyone else on the Billboard charts, picking up three consecutive Producer of the Year Grammys for his work with Taylor Swift, The 1975, Diana Ross, Lana Del Rey, Carly Rae Jepsen, St. Vincent and others. Meanwhile, on stage, he’s gradually grown Bleachers, grassroots style, from what was once perceived as a part-time side-project to arena headliners, nurturing a dedicated, passionate audience that feels in line with his jam and punk roots.

He says, “I really love both, but the experience of being a musician and an artist is one thing and the experience of being on the road is a very different thing. I don’t know how you can prepare for it or wrap your head around in any way. It’s just calling for you for some reason.”

At times, Jack admits, onlookers have struggled to make sense of his unique Venn diagram. The same can be said for Bleachers’ music, which often cases sad, emotional stories in up-tempo anthems.

“The music we make blurs the boundaries between darkness and joy,” he says. “It can make your body move and shout. It can also make you cry and yearn. I vacillate between those emotions pretty quickly.”

It’s a typically busy day for the often overscheduled musician. (Google his name and “Can’t talk, I’m at work” to see one humorous trend and troll.) A night earlier, Jack and his wife, the actress Margaret Qualley, attended the VMAs in Elmont, N.Y., where he walked the red carpet and received prime seating. Then, he hosted a small late-night gathering at Electric Lady for some friends, before heading to Midtown early the next day to work on a Broadway revival of Romeo + Juliet he is scoring. The next morning, he’s off to California for some sessions and to play a few marquee Bleachers concerts. From there, Jack will return to the East Coast for even more sessions and even more dates, including the beforementioned sold-out show at Madison Square Garden. Yet, in his mind, he’s still below 14th Street.

“The Garden is something your grandmother would understand, but I was always looking at venues like Bowery Ballroom as the grand goal,” he says of the approximately 575-person-capacity downtown Manhattan club that, for acts of a certain demographic, demarked graduating from bars to clubs with a proper stage. “We played Bowery for this cycle warm up, and I rocketed back to when I was younger, thinking, ‘This is it. There’s nothing beyond it.’ Being a touring artist is filled with achievements that 99% of people don’t understand.”

He notes that when someone mentioned his upcoming MSG show during that VMAs party, he immediately started to rattle off Bleachers’ slow rise through New York venue by venue—and he could likely recall similar trajectories in many other markets.

“I feel bummed for anyone who got it too young—they don’t know how impossible and rare it is to get bodies into the room,” he says. “This sounds like it’s coming from a place of drama, but I just relate to people who understand the miracle of a crowd in a room, let alone a big crowd in a big room, after playing so many shows to 10 people.”

Indeed, of all his accolades, Jack is particularly proud of Bleachers’ success on the road, due to his love of live music and the years he spent circumventing the country with his previous groups.

“When I started the band, Bleachers had no audience,” he says. “I’d played thousands of shows by then, spent my entire life on the road, but the band itself had no audience, which is really weird”

He knew that in order to build a group that would withstand the test of time, he first had to foster an organic community. It’s an important lesson he learned during his first summers away from home.

“I grew up going to camp, and camp friends are this mythological group of people who you share so much of your life with. Then you go off, live your lives and meet back up and share your experiences again the next summer. It’s like this protective, weird little group where you grow really vastly because you spend so much time away from each other. And that’s how I feel about my band and our audience. When we’re together, we have these explosive moments, but then we’re apart. So when we come back together through the music or the audience interactions, people become really close. The life you’ve lived—all these relationships that the band has with the fans and that they have with each other—it’s almost like we’re pen pals or camp friends. You rush back together to tell the stories of who you are now.”

***

Jack grew up in Northern New Jersey, in the shadow of New York City, at an indelible time for the Garden State music scene. He attended Solomon Schechter and other local schools and later commuted to the Professional Children’s School across the Hudson River, feeling like an outcast in a ‘80s John Hughes movie for much of his adolescence.

“The culture some people grew up in, in middle-class New Jersey, the only goal was to get into the right college,” he says. “That’s your life—get your shit together to go to the right college. And that’s a pretty young age to have that stamp of approval or disapproval put on you. I started tanking myself in school because I needed to reject it so badly. ”

At the same time, the regional punk scene was thriving, with groups of enterprising, young musicians and promoters hosting all-ages weekend shows at a network of firehouses, Legion halls and other community spaces. It ended up serving as a beta test for a generation of future arena level performers, managers, agents and other members of the music industry.

“You went to high school, everyone sucked—it was still the days of cheerleaders and jocks—and then there were three kids at any given school that listened to The Smiths, cared about Miles and everything in between,” he says. “But this group of 50-100 kids would put on these shows and that’s what you did if you didn’t play football. It was free thinking people—politics went along with it. Everyone was vegan, reading Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, getting our literature from bands like Propagandhi. It was the birth of this wave of emo, before it went mainstream, but it was also oddly jammy. It reminds me of the early American festivals, where there would be a fast hardcore band, something acoustic and then some psych—you can always tell something special is going on when there’s real genre-bending happening. It was like, ‘This is where all the good music lives that is a little more hyper or a little bit subversive.’”

Pre-internet, Jack discovered new acts through bunkmates at camp or friends in neighboring towns having parallel experiences—an organic exchange of information that continues to underscore his approach. “It’s true to this day,” he says. “With my music, the artists I produce, big or small, there’s the world, and then there’s the core audience.”

In his early teens, Jack started touring outside Bergen County with his punk band Outline, using the DIY bible Book Your Own Fuckin’ Life to help find likeminded places to play and stay on the road.

“I felt lucky to do things that other people laughed at,” he says. “I remember coming back from tour and talking about all the floors we slept on and driving straight through the night, all the crazy stories. And people would be like, ‘That sounds terrible,’ but I loved it. I wanted to live that life so badly. I fell in love with touring and being in that community—this little gang that was moving independent of space and time, almost separate from the music.”

Jack is quick to signal the support of his family, who encouraged his budding music career and also proved to him early on that life can be more nuanced than a one dimensional character in a film. Though his father Rick found success in the business world, he was also an accomplished ragtime guitar player, and Jack describes his mom Shira as a child of the ‘60s who “did all the drugs” and has a strong sense of humor.

“As a dad, we bonded over whatever was important to him as he was growing up—starting with baseball, then geodes and, ultimately, music,” Rick says. “For both Shira and myself, music played a big part in our lives and classic rock was always a soundtrack in our house. The very first concert we took Jack to was Aerosmith and Collective Soul. We would go to the [pop- radio holiday concert] Jingle Ball every year and the Allman Brothers.”

However, despite certain stabilities, life took a tragic turn when Jack’s younger sister Sarah died of brain cancer when he was in high school. She was only 13.

“I didn’t have the kind of parents that were offended by rap or thought that hardcore was noise,” he says. “But it was really when my sister got sick and died, when I was 18, that they said, ‘Go do whatever you want. This world that we’re in right now, it doesn’t matter what college you go to. That doesn’t mean shit.’ I was launching my career and feeling completely buried at the same time. So this great family tragedy—that level of life that hit our family when I had just started to live on the road— made my family say, ‘Do whatever makes you happy, go wherever you feel yourself because all these weird life rules, this strange corner of the world that we live in, it’s all irrelevant.’”

Sarah’s passing, combined with 9/11 and the death of a close cousin in Iraq, sent Jack spiraling. He’s talked openly for years about his struggles with anxiety and depression and has long used his music as a vehicle to express that.

“I always land back in this place of somewhat writing through the lens of grief, even if the song has nothing to do with it,” he says. “And every time I finish an album, I always find a great amount of peace with that because I wrestle with it when I’m making art.”

Around the same time, he formed a more folk-oriented band, Steel Train, with his classmate Scott Irby-Ranniar, who was best known for originating the role of Simba in The Lion King on Broadway. They busked in New York before expanding to a full band that included, at various points, bassist Evan Winiker, guitarist Matthew Goldman, drummer Matthias Gruber, guitarist Daniel Silbert, drummer Jon Shiffman and keyboardist Justin Huey. (Winiker, who also came of age on the Jersey punk circuit, would go on to manage Alec Benjamin, MAX, Walk The Earth, Thirty Seconds To Mars and the Disco Biscuits during his career.)

Steel Train scored a deal with Drive Thru Records, a label most closely associated with the pop-punk and emo worlds, but also started to reflect the roots influences Jack absorbed growing up—Neil Young, Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Allman Brothers Band, Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, Mike Bloomfield, Al Kooper and Miles Davis. The group cut their full length debut, 2005’s Twilight Tales from the Prairies of the Sun, in California with producer Stephen Barncard—who also sat at the helm for the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty—and used Santana as a touchstone. Gene Parsons and David Grisman both contributed to the set, which was highlighted by the campfire sing-along “Road Song.”

Twilight Tales from the Prairies of the Sun and the band’s dynamic live show helped Steel Train make waves on the jamband circuit and burgeoning festival scene, which—at a time when both Phish and The Dead had reached an impasse—had started to incorporate a range of modern sounds. By then, Jack already had a knack for a big hook, as well.

“Steel Train was touching the punk scene, but we were jamming our faces off,” he says. “We were covering Nick Cave, M. Ward and the Dead in the same set. We were playing songs that had real pop sensibilities, but then we would take them out for 10 minutes. I came up at this perfect time when the corners of the jam and indie scenes—and even the indie-rap scene and the folk scene—were touching. It was exactly where my head was at. I spent as much time listening to the Dead and Dylan as I did listening to early Jay-Z and OutKast—the sound of those early festival lineups. I think pop music was in a really weird state, and the mainstream was in a really weird state. At that time, the jam scene was signaling, ‘This is a home for all the good music that’s happening.’”

He cites John Scofield and Medeski Martin & Wood’s ‘90s college-party classic, the funky and experimental A Go Go, as a particularly revelatory record. “It was a huge turning point because it connected a lot of dots—these newer people who were doing this thing that looked like something we had seen before but didn’t sound like something we’d heard before,” he admits. “It was so tasteful and so melodic and so freaky and dancey. And at that time, there was a lot of hip music flying around, like Air’s Moon Safari. It all felt connected.”

Steel Train scored a Thursday night showcase spot at Bonnaroo in 2005 that Jack still describes as a turning point in his life; like many of his shows, his parents made the trip and the band played for 10,000 fans, sandwiched between sparsely attended gigs in the Carolinas and Arkansas. He can still rattle off the other acts on the bill, like My Morning Jacket, Jurassic 5, Rilo Kiley, M. Ward and STS9, as if the show was last weekend, and he says the night “changed my life in every way you can imagine.”

Steel Train continued to traffic in the jam world for several years, touring with Robert Randolph, North Mississippi Allstars and Grace Potter while making stops at festivals from California’s High Sierra to Florida’s Langerado. And, like many of their peers in the post-jam world, the quintet’s sound naturally started to sway closer to the emotive indie rock of that era on their subsequent releases.

In 2008, Jack also formed the more baroque, expansive group fun. with keyboardist Andrew Dost and singer Nate Ruess, initially as a side hustle. His sister Rachel, a fashion designer, was dating Ruess at the time, and they even worked on some fun. material at the Antonoff family house. He juggled both bands for a bit—however, Steel Train struggled to breakthrough to the next level. (They did score some wins, playing Coachella, appearing on Conan O’ Brien’s late-night show and achieving their goal of packing Bowery Ballroom.)

But, eventually, Steel Train started to slow down and some members stepped away. “We loved playing together so much, but they just didn’t want to be on the road anymore,” Jack says. “And I never got that. I’d always be like, ‘Why?’ But, while it was artistically and personally successful for me, it didn’t support people and we all lived at home.”

Concurrently, fun. began to make some strides and Jack shifted more of his attention to that project. Then, in 2012, the trio released their sophomore LP, Some Nights—a set of stadium-sized songs produced with Jeff Bhasker, whose own journey from Lettuce keyboardist to hip hop whiz-kid mirrors Jack’s circuitous rise. Aided by a spot on Glee and a Super Bowl commercial, Some Nights was a massive, generational hit that was hailed as a savior of rock music and spawned ubiquitous singles like “We Are Young,” “Some Nights” and “Carry On.” The band jumped from clubs to massive theaters within a matter of months and Jack, bolstered by some high-profile relationships, became a visible presence on the awards-show circuit. (It’s noteworthy that even when fun. were at their pop zenith, Jack still proudly displayed his jam and punk roots and once toyed with hiring The Slip’s Andrew Barr as their touring drummer.)

Jack, who had long taken an active role in the creation of his groups’ albums, used his newfound celebrity status wisely, quickly making inroads as a producer and songwriter. He hit it off particularly well with a new class of singers who were committed to expanding pop’s horizons, and his years working the club circuit have helped those acts nurture passionate audiences of their own.

Yet, off the clock, he also started working on tracks for what would become Bleachers, utilizing his hotel rooms while on tour with fun. The first song he came up with—the heartfelt, treadmill banger “Rollercoaster”—felt like a natural progression from Steel Train’s final originals and he even considered involving some members of that band, before ultimately deciding it was something he needed to explore on his own.

Jack says that the initial version of the catchy cut had more of a country/My Morning Jacket bent, eventually adding the Depeche Mode vibes that would characterize early Bleachers.

“Bleachers was a Hail Mary,” Jack says. “I felt really annoyed with the idea of where a lot of things were going at that time, and I really wanted to go and figure it out on the road. I didn’t want to have this crafted show that I was just going to come and deliver every night. When I put this band together, I wanted to freak myself out. I knew how to tour, I knew how to play live, I knew what I wanted to do, but I didn’t want to rely on anything. When fun. got really popular, and I got to see what it was like to be in a successful band, I had this funny reaction that was just like, ‘I don’t want to do this in that context.’ And I think that’s because I had always been a band leader, written my own music, sung my own lyrics, and I felt this boldness to just take the hardest left. And then in the midst of that, I also resented how clean everything was in the pop world I was thrust into.”

***

Jack released Bleachers’ debut LP, Strange Desire, in 2014, which included “Rollercoaster” and the bouncy lead track “I Wanna Get Better.” He crafted most of the set by himself, though some friends and family members helped out, and both Yoko Ono and Grimes made appearances. He also put together a live version of Bleachers featuring guitarist Mikey Freedom Hart, drummer Sean Hutchinson, saxophonist Evan Smith and Shiffman, who helped assemble the touring group.

The band’s unique configuration was a direct callback to some formative live shows he took in while growing up.

“It was straight from being a kid and watching the Allman Brothers and wanting two drummers to Robyn touring on Body Talk,” he says. “I was seeing an old-school and a modern version of two drummers working. You can contextualize Bleachers’ music somewhere in between the Allman Brothers and Robyn. I just wanted to go out and find the people who were gonna dig pretty deep before we fully got it together because so much magic comes from those unplanned moments of touring.”

As if they were an unknown indie act, Bleachers hit the ground running at SXSW in 2014 and have remained busy ever since.

“Initially, it was described to me as Jack’s solo project during breaks when fun. was not active,” says Hutchinson, who cut his teeth with the Bay Area jamband New Monsoon and was brought into Bleachers due to his proficiency with electronics and samples. “Jack made the first album by himself, and we figured out how to cut up the samples and play everything live.”

Strange Desire made waves in both the alt-pop and festival worlds; at the same time, fun. started to fizzle out as the members, who saw themselves as something of a super-group alliance, worked on their own music. Jack says that Bleachers’ second album, Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night, was the first time he really started to see Bleachers’ live energy making an imprint in the studio.

“Shortly after we started, fun. went on hiatus and Jack wanted to go full steam ahead with Bleachers,” Hutchinson says. “It grew organically. The live personality of the band influences the records and then it became this symbiotic thing where the band’s live sound and the studio sound are one in the same. Pretty much everyone in the band has some background in jazz or jamband music, and that’s started to come out over time.”

By this year’s self-titled effort, Bleachers’ live sound had matured, taking on an E Street Band looseness on cuts like the future Jersey Shore standard “Modern Girl.”

“The real reason why it was self-titled was that it was the first time that I had been in a room and all my references had been to my own band,” he says. “Usually, my references are feelings, emotions or literal things—‘Play it like Ringo.’ And I totally left that space. I was only thinking about my band. We earned self-titled.”

However, that prankster, subversive spirit from Jack’s VFW days remains. “Modern Girls” was even curiously credited to Jack Antonoff & Bleachers.

“I like playing with it,” he says with a smile. “Sometimes I stylize it as me and the band. I don’t see it as something that I have to be intensely perfect with in the marketing. People can take different meaning from it but the meaning I take is that the band is growing. The playing is growing and changing. The way we’re rubbing up against each other and the way we’re rubbing up against our audience is growing.”

“It wasn’t until I saw Bleachers live on Sept. 4, 2022, that I completely understood what they are as a band,” Jack’s manager Jamie Oborne, who oversees the careers of acts like The 1975, says. “I was completely shocked that I worked in music and had no idea that they were one of the best live bands on the planet. The show felt so urgent and like such a celebration of life, what I now know Jack sometimes calls ‘tribute living.’”

As Bleachers continued to barnstorm the country, Jack’s production career skyrocketed, to say the least. The ‘80s inspired, pinball energy he first started toying with as he was dreaming up Bleachers has crept into the records he’s worked on. And he often uses the live members of Bleachers—which now also includes saxophonist Zem Audu and drummer Michael Riddleberger, who took over Shiffman’s seat when he stepped way— on different sessions.

“A big part of the Jersey sound is the remarkable push and pull of honoring where you’re from and also wanting to put it in the rearview mirror,” he adds, before name-checking his annual festival, Shadow of the City. “There’s this big yearning. You are in the ‘shadow of the city,’ but still so left out.”

Like the best jam acts, Bleachers have tossed in creative covers, welcomed a cross genre mix of guests and even performed albums in their entirety. He also started mining his past at The Ally Coalition Talent Show, a variety show that supports his work with LBGTQ+ youth. The lineups are insane, drawing everyone from Taylor Swift to Trey Anastasio.

“I don’t see why I can’t have Trey, Taylor, Phoebe, The National, Spoon, Kacey Musgraves, and Bartees Strange with his mom doing a jazz cover,” he says. “There’s no part of me that thinks that can’t exist in one night. And there’s a lot of joy in putting that together. It’s so much more exciting to think of people that don’t make sense together, but sort of do for some reason. The thread is that they all have similar audiences who know every song, every word, every motion, every drum part. If you change it, they see it, they hear it. That’s the Bleachers audience.”

He takes a breath and pauses, before continuing, “This is why it doesn’t matter the genre of the music. The only thing that matters is that your relationship is deep enough that every movement is noticed, like a family member. Which is why, if I see a show on the Eras Tour or I watch Kendrick, it’s the same thing in its own way. It’s dressed up totally different, but it’s coming from the exact same place, which is a group of people who know exactly what is going on and therefore are so smart, so versed in the material, that they demand the artist or band in front of them to take them somewhere new all the time. And that is the highest level—you want to be challenged by your audience, you don’t want to hold one over on them. All those artists are different sides of the same coin.”

In May 2023, Jack made a surprise home-state appearance with Swift during an Eras stadium show, when he emerged, jamband sit-in style, for an acoustic take on their live rarity “Getaway Car.” Stripped of its production, the tune could pass for an early Steel Train track.

“It reminds me of Phish, all these little Easter eggs of why we’re doing this and the biggest hit isn’t even close to the biggest song of the night—it’s the off-the-cuff thing that you do in this moment that nods to what happened five years ago on this stage,” he says. “That’s one of the reasons why I love Taylor and love working with her and love her live show and everything that she does so much. Even when we’re in the studio, she’s always pointing toward the brilliance and depth of her fanbase. It’s just sort of like, ‘They’re gonna get this cause of this and this will freak them out,’ and that’s how I see music. That’s how my favorite bands see music. It’s why I like talking to Tool fans so much, even though I’m not at all the shows. I just like the way they interact with the band.”

***

On October 4, Bleachers played Madison Square Garden. It had been just over 10 years since the first Bleachers gig and almost three decades since those initial DIY gatherings.

The night kicked off a busy weekend at MSG for a certain subset of millennial mom-and-dad rockers, with Vampire Weekend playing the same venue the next two days. “Ezra [Koenig] texted me when we realized we were playing back-to-back shows at the Garden and was like, ‘Not bad for two kids from New Jersey,’” Jack says.

Jack is also acutely aware of the current jamband revival moment, where bands like Vampire Weekend have reclaimed their improv roots and a new crop of groove based performers raised on those indie acts, like Goose, are becoming household names. Jack speaks highly of the times he’s shared the stage with Goose’s Rick Mitarotonda— including a full-circle moment when the Bleachers frontman hosted the Bonnaroo SuperJam—and he is excited that the corners of the worlds he loved growing up have started to touch once again.

Bleachers’ MSG play had some big moments, including when Jack ascended to his recreation of Electric Lady for some tender, solo tunes. Yet, the entire night felt more like a large club show than a theatrical pop tour.

“I’m feeling very anti-production at this point, which is funny because, in the Bleachers show, there are a couple of huge swings, like when they bring the studio on stage,” he says during a post-gig check in, after apologizing for being late. (He had a good reason—he was on the phone with his mom.) “But I see all that as 10% of the night. I’m feeling a little fried on everything being larger than life. A band on stage, to me, is so much more exciting. There was a time when no one was doing what The Flaming Lips did. And now these gags are almost expected, especially at a big festival. Before we went on stage, I said to the guys: ‘This isn’t a competition; this isn’t a test. We need to go out and do what we do. Even though, for all of us geographically and personally, this is a pivotal and emotional moment, we have to play a show.”

He also shied away from making the night a hootenanny-style “and friends” revue. The only special guest was Rick Antonoff, who slipped on stage to play guitar.

“There were a lot of people in the building that, at any other given night, I would have brought up on stage, but there was something about that show where I was just like, ‘Outside of my dad, no one’s getting on this stage besides us,’” Jack says. “I said, ‘We’re gonna go front to back and carry this thing completely alone.’ We can be very communal, and people pop up from different sides of my work life. And I love all those threads, but I didn’t want it to be about anything but us.”

While a portion of the capacity crowd likely knew Bleachers from the radio or Jack’s collaborations, there was an overarching sense that the musicians had “won over” most in attendance at a show somewhere along the along the way.

After stepping off the stage at MSG, Jack felt a creative itch and went down to Electric Lady to record at 2 a.m. “Usually Bleachers cycles come to almost a stunning, crashing end because we love playing live so much that we’ll leave nothing out there,” he says. “And this is the first time where my body’s pulling me to go write more, and then my body’s also pulling me to go tour more. I’ve never really been in this spot. I shut down and just think, so I don’t know how to handle it. I’m in the middle of thinking about that.”

Although that potential release is still a ways off, the patience that has colored Bleachers’ recent performances has been palpable and will likely influence his direction.

“Earlier on, I was obsessed with how things had to sound,” he says. “They had to be perfect. And then time goes on. You incorporate the band more and you realize that, when you develop this, it’s all a reflection about where we’re at. When we were a new band, we impressed ourselves by being able to lock into these crazy arrangements. That’s what gave us the energy. And then, when we were starting to tour more, we started to develop this telepathy, where we can speak to each other without speaking. We can grab these moments with each other, almost with just a look or a feeling. At this point, which is a completely new phase for us, knowing that we can do that changes the context of doing something really loose because—if we know that we have the ability as a group to play these really complicated, intense things together and nail them—we know we can stay on our toes. This whole tour had a looseness to it—if we weren’t together for 10 years and playing so much, we would never be able to achieve that looseness. It would sound sloppy and weird. It’s something we’ve developed.”

“Jack was not the frontman originally in Steel Train,” Rick, who witnessed his son’s career trajectory from the start, points out. “When Scott left the band, Jack became the frontman. He was pretty much a natural at it from the beginning. Bleachers seems to be a logical evolution from Steel Train.”

When crafting a setlist, Jack says that he likes figuring out a few staple set pieces for a run and then leave certain sections open in case he wants to call an audible or offer some deeper cuts. It’s another lesson he learned from the Boss himself.

“Springsteen does it best—it’s shock and comfort,” Jack says excitedly. “I’ve gotten so much important advice from him, but that’s the one that I’ve taken the most to heart. Every show, every day in the studio, shock and comfort. If you nail that balance, that’s the whole damn thing. We could make a mess of the songs and make them all unrecognizable and go to the weirdest places in our heads, but that’s pandering. And comfort is pandering in its own way, too. As a performer, you can’t lie to yourself—when you’ve got something on the comfort side, when you can kill it, when you can deliver the sauce of a band that has been together for a long time and can play a certain way. But you also know when you’re not fully sure if something scares you. You are on the shock train so hard that there isn’t anything you can do about it. The space between those two things causes growth. We don’t fuck around when it comes to living between those spaces.”